This album will gently break your heart

The project, ‘Sunflower Girl’ on Dubious Recordings, explores the territories of love, loss and rebirth. The strange thing about songs is that they take on a life of their own even as you write them – they become a place to lay things to rest, to put them outside yourself and diffuse the emotional tension. I think I just had to write and see what happened.

Album review

Thornton writes wonderfully mature intelligent songs that require the listener to be equally mature and intelligent. SUNFLOWER GIRL is an album of wonderfully crafted songs that could only come from a man for whom writing is an extension of himself. But as thoughtful and well written as the likes of Shake The Moon Down, Under My Skin and Shores of Forever are (and you could select any of the songs as perfect examples), the real substance comes from the fact that Thornton is unable to separate himself from the music. SUNFLOWER GIRL will gently break your heart and then immediately restore your faith and for that alone, it deserves its place among the singer-songwriter classics.

There is a gentle integrity about SUNFLOWER GIRL that originates from one source, the creator’s care, paradoxically it also lifts the spirits. Andy Thornton is surely one of those musicians who measures success and failure in the quality of the music, not in the units ‘moved’. It certainly meets the most stringent quality test on the first, let’s hope for the sake of real music it also succeeds in the second. Listening to SUNFLOWER GIRL is an experience you’ll never forget.

Michael Mee
Maverick Magazine: July 2006